A brief cinematic interlude

Raise a glass this a.m. to Laverne, aka Penny Marshall, who passed yesterday at the age of 75. She was a giant, an actress and filmmaker who was that rarest of creatures: A woman who yielded heavyweight clout in Hollywood, which talks a good game about the advancement of women but in practice is as chauvinistic a culture as exists anywhere.

Marshall defied that, making films about and featuring women that were more than just the standard Tinseltown lip service paid by her male contemporaries. The best of them, in the Blob's estimation, was "A League of Their Own," a tribute to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s and '50s that remains one of the Blob's favorite sports movies.

And so raise a glass to that, too. And to the Blob's  "A League of Their Own" story, which is likely somewhat different than most.

It's not every day, after all, that you get to watch a film about someone alongside the actual someones.

This happened because Fort Wayne was home to the Daisies, one of the AAGPBL's anchor franchises, and I was a sportswriter in Fort Wayne. This occasionally brought me in contact with the real-life women fictionalized by Geena Davis, Lori Petty and Rosie O'Donnell in the film. They were a delight, these women -- accomplished athletes who still carried themselves with the swagger of athletes even into their 70s and 80s, and who always seemed forever young because of that.

And so it was regrettable that my contact with them usually happened when one of them passed.

My phone would ring and Dottie Collins, who faithfully kept tabs on all the gals, would be on the line telling me this or that AAGPBL alum had died. And then one day the phone rang, and it was another of the gals, telling me Dottie herself had died.

Saddest of days, that one.

Happiest of days when "A League of Their Own" opened in Fort Wayne.

It wasn't just that the film was coming to one of the old AAGPBL cities, you see. It's that a whole clutch of former AAGPBL players showed up in the Fort for it. And so my wife and I watched "A League of Their Own" sitting in a movie theater filled with those who actually lived it.

You know that scene at the end, where they play the Madonna theme song over footage of the real-life AAGPBL players playing a game on the diamond at Cooperstown?

Half of those women on the screen were in the audience that night. And so every time one of them appeared, cries of recognition rose up out of the darkness.

There you are! .... Look, it's (insert name here)! ... Oh, you're really givin' it to the ump there! ...

A night at the movies doesn't get  more magical than that.